Stephanopoulos, Pelecanos & Argyros To Highlight Conference

The three Greek Americans will be honored for their public service and creative and business contributions. “Our theme is ‘The Torchbearers of Our Faith and Hellenic Heritage: The New Generation of Leaders,’ which recognizes these extraordinary leaders who exemplify our Hellenic ideals from such diverse fields,” said Stephen G. Yeonas, Leadership 100 Chairman.

Torchbearers of our faith?

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George Stephanopoulos, host of ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and ABC News’s Chief Washington Correspondent, who was President Clinton’s senior political advisor and Communications Director; George Pelecanos, the award-winning author, film and television producer whose newest book, The Way Home, was on President Obama’s reading list this summer; and George Argyros, former United States Ambassador to Spain and one of America’s foremost real estate investors, will highlight the 19th Annual Leadership 100 Conference at Hotel del Coronado, Coronado, California, from February 4-7, 2010.

The three Greek Americans will be honored for their public service and creative and business contributions. “Our theme is ‘The Torchbearers of Our Faith and Hellenic Heritage: The New Generation of Leaders,’ which recognizes these extraordinary leaders who exemplify our Hellenic ideals from such diverse fields,” said Stephen G. Yeonas, Leadership 100 Chairman.

The program will also acknowledge the life-time achievements of two other outstanding individuals: Harry C. Cordellos, a world class athlete who overcame childhood visual challenges and Deborah Szekely, co-founder of the modern day health and fitness movement who is the founder of two leading destination spas, Golden Door and Rancho La Puerta, and is a noted philanthropist and public servant, who will relate their inspiring life stories.

In addition, the youngest leaders, Leadership 100 Partners, now numbering 86 young professional men and women, and younger new members as well as younger members of the Executive Committee and Board of Trustees, will be recognized for breathing new life into the 25-year-old mission of Leadership 100.

His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios and Metropolitans from throughout the country will join the conferees for an exciting program that includes the General Assembly and Grand Banquet and, a special treat, San Diego’s St. Spyridon Greek Dance and Choral School’s Aegean and Ionian Dance Groups who will perform Greek Folk Dances at the traditional Glendi on Friday night.

The Hotel del Coronado is San Diego’s only truly beachfront hotel. Situated on 28 beautiful oceanfront acres on Coronado Island, the 120-year-old structure is a beacon of grandeur and refinement that includes three distinct building complexes: the Victorian Building, a National Historic Landmark, Ocean Towers and California Cabanas, and Beach Village villas and cottages.

Comments

I know it’s tempting to assume all or many of these award winners are only nominally Orthodox. I don’t know if that is the case, or not. Is anyone aware of their involvement in their local parish? Or, are they, in fact, being recognized primarily for being “Torchbearers of Our Hellenic Heritage” rather than “Our Faith”? In many ways, I hope they are very active, very quietly. There is something that rubs me the wrong way about successful or famous people in a church body being paraded forward as exemplars of the faith.

Argyros is an archon of the EP. Don’t know to what extent that speaks against the nominalism of his faith. I only know of him for losing lawsuits: one brought by thousands of former tenants who had been cheated out of security deposits by his company and one in which he unsuccessfully challenged the county’s finding that he had engaged in tax evasion.

They might be very active in their parishes for all we know, but that is not the real point of the piece. The real problem is the conflation of the Orthodox faith and “Hellenic Heritage” by means of the ethnicity of the person being celebrated.

The definitions of both Hellenism and Orthodoxy in this formulation are impoverished because either will represent only ethnic trappings. Hellenism apart from Orthodoxy is a false construct. Orthodoxy incorporates Hellenism through the Cappadocian synthesis. Unifying them in the way we see in the press release (through ethnic personage) is not historically sound.

From the other direction, if you want to redefine Hellenism as a separate track alongside Orthodoxy and yet posit both as equally authoritative, then you are left with a question yet unanswered: Which source narrative is authoritative? — pagan mythology or Holy Scripture? Here the the Cappadocian synthesis is functionally ignored (leap-frogged essentially), and the new point of contact (the new synthesis) between Orthodoxy and Hellenism occurs in the person of the successful Greek. No wonder there is such confusion between morality and politics in Constantinople — which trumps the other?

I don’t begrudge the success of the men celebrated and I have no idea about their Christian lives. The distortion of the tradition is a bit hard to swallow though.

Did anybody catch Stephanopoulos on Hannity last week? He was bending over backwards to support Jennings, the “School Safety Czar.” it seems that several years ago, a 15 year old boy who was meeting a man for sex in a bus station bathroom came to him for advise. Jennings told the boy in question that he should be using a condom. Sex with 15 year olds is a crime. Stephanopoulos went to bat for him big time. It seems like the boy was really 16 years old.

Andrew, thanks for retrieving that. The guy’s an absolute twerp. How far have we fallen that any normal man would twist himself into a pretzel on national TV in order to defend such a reprehensible creature.